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Iona Johnson
Iona is a printmaker, working primarily with lino. She is currently enrolled in Honours in Printmaking at the University of Tasmania. Her linocutting techniques are innovative as she combines cutting with etching lino. In 2004 she was selected as a finalist in Silk Cut award for one of her works, River. This work is emblematic of the way she often builds up large works from smaller prints and images.
Her work this year continues to explore the world of water and is also big. She is developing a body of work about immersion in water, specifically the icy Tasmanian mountain streams where she lives. The prints aim to immerse the viewer in the sensations of being underwater, sensations that range from shock and chill to a sense of floating enjoyment. Immersion is a metaphor for the way that we can lose our everyday identity in something larger than ourselves and in the process somehow gain a more intense consciousness of being.
As Bachelard said:
Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless. Blachard
It would seem, then, that it is through their immensity that these two kinds of space - the space of intimacy and world space - blend. When human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical (from “The Poetics of Space”, 1964.)
